But does it also deliver out of the box push notifications on my mobile?
Getting a push message such as “ the washing machine is ready” as part of an automation flow is realy convient and easy to do in Homey.
But as I said I do not use HA to manage my automations so maybe my info is already outdated.
yes it does
I’m not sure exactly what you mean, but if you have the HA mobile app installed you can send notifications to your phone(s) from automations.
I have used HA for 3 years as it was the only system capable of integrating the devices I wanted in my house (the most important: heating, ventilation and alarm system). About two years ago my brother moved to a new house and wanted a smart home system. I gave him a Homey Pro and helped setting it up. At that time my view was that Home Assistant was the right system only for those who wanted a new hobby.
This has changed over the last two years. HA has become much easier to use, and with HA Green you have a very easy start. But for a user with your experience i would suggest using a second hand mini PC (Intel 5 older model) with Zigbee and Zwave USB adapters as needed (and with time a thread adapter). That is the sollution i use in my home, while I use my HA Yellow at my cabin. The difference in speed in updating dashboards on a large system is substantial (200+ devices). I use HAOS directly on the PC - that is the recommended solution unless you want to run it as a docker to be able to run other systems on the same HW.
Just my 2 cents here
I initially tried HA because at the time (in 2022) I thought Homey was too expensive and I was not sure that it was not pure marketing.
So I went with HA. Initial configuration was not so difficult on an Intel NUC (I found some good tutorials).
Setting up devices was not more complicated in general than with Homey.
Possibilities were endless, forum activity was amazing and there was almost no way you could ask a question without getting an answer rather quickly.
So all was good?
Well when i started wondering how I could use HA outside of my home that when the relatiosnhip started going sour.
At the time there was basically 2 routes:
- free and cumbersome one (lots of technical efforts)
- seamless but with a cost (a few Euros per month). I could not accept the principle of paying just to get a remote access to my home automation system, for me this should have been out of the box. But you can’t really complain for an open source solution, right?
That’s basically when I decided to give Homey a shot. And I was convinced very quickly:
- very stable platform (never have any issue after upgrades). I only lost the connection once (Athom had a general issue for a couple of hours if I remember).
- acceptable device compatibility. Not perfect (for instance using Tuya is not a no-brainer) but I usually find a device that does the job for a reasonable price
- I was a bit disappointed when you start going into simple flows (not even advanced). I found it not intuitive , although everyone says it is. Coming from Vera I found it complicated initially and major features missing from the official platform, but usually available from the community.
So in the end for me Homey remains the best choice since I don’t want to write any code.
HA remains the most powerful / open solutionn, with probably the best value for money. But it comes with a cost: if you really want full power you will often need to get more technical. HA is also improving constantly it approach to remove the need for code writing.
There is no need to oppose them, they have a different target:
- Homey is for users who favor simplicity
- HA is for users who want freedom, but accept to spend more time (and have the technical ability). But doing simple things in HA is not really more complex than in Homey
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I run home assistant and honey together with the ha-community app for homey
All my devices are in home assistant running on a Intel NUC and homey only has the ha-community app
The advanced flow system is unbeaten the rest is miles better in home assistant. I have fake switches (helpers) created in home assistant and have them in homey aswell and sensors that are combined sensors (average temperature)
The advanced flow system is very solid but that’s the only positive thing on Homey imho
If you are thinking of buying hardware go for home assistant yellow it’s more feature complete
This resonates to me on many levels.
After a year of really struggling with many devices dropping off, i was soo done with homey, i bought a home assistant Raspberry π5 , where the shop already installed home assistant operating system on a SSD card, installed some other things like the zigbee2mqtt, configured the zwave and zigbee coordinators,…
Pretty much worked out of the box. (From a dutch shop)
So far i did the most automations with simple logic. I need to drive into the “node red” wish is equivalent to “advanced flows” of atom that you have to pay extra for.
Backups: no extra fee.
The integration of local voice control looks promising.
Very soon I will crash hammer the 
homey and video that.
So yes, i confirm HA is very usable without having to code in yaml.
Just upgraded HA to 2025.1 
Why is HACS missing after an upgrade?
I had to reload/repair the integration. That’s one of the problems I have after every upgrade. And the long list of errors in startup log caused by changes inside HA removing or changing internal logic 
That’s starting to sound like a local issue then. I’m not running 2025.1 yet (because I always wait for the second or third release) but I typically don’t have any issues with upgrades.
Thanks @robertklep & @Undertaker
perhaps a hiccup. Currently I fight with the DWD integration (current version) that does not work anymore and can’t be added again. But that’s going off-topic 
I would suggest looking at a Odroid N2+ or better. Comes pre-loaded and setup very easy.
Link below
ODROID-N2+ — ameriDroid
Hi,
I am a newbie to HA in need of help.
I installed HA yesterday on my Synology NAS using docker (and it already found 50+ of my devices).
Since I aim to integrate HA with Homey, I followed the instructions provided by @Peter_Kawa and found out that the supervisor is missing in my HA install.
The HACS link is down and I am out of my depth trying to find out how to add it.
I would really appreciate if somebody could point out a comprehensive “how to” add HACS to my Synology config (and why the hell isn’t it already included in the package ?)
Because you chose to use Docker, which is a very minimal, bare-bones installation of HA meant for experienced HA users. If this is your first time using HA I would really advise against it and, if possible, use a virtual machine running HAOS instead.
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Thanks,
I installed HAOS on my Synology and I indeed have the supervisor 
Edit : and have successfully integrated HA and Homey thanks to @Peter_Kawa 's tutorial 
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You should be able to install community apps manually, omitting HACS, if possible at all > But I have zero experience with HA @ Docker.
It’s often/always explained ed at the github page. Example:
I have been using Smartthings since V1. It was straightforward. What drove me nuts was not only the incompatible devices (Chamberlain comes to mind) —you had to put a vertical sensor on the garage door. If the sensor was perpendicular to the floor, it thought the garage door was closed, and if horizontal, it thought it was open. Also, Nest and Ring went in and out, depending on the day.
Over the summer, I decided to jump on HA big time (Mini PC, Intel 12th Gen Core i3-1220P (10C/12T, up to 4.4GHz), Mini Computer with a G12 i3 with 24GB LPDDR5 RAM 500GB M.2 2280 PCle 4.0x4 SSD,4K Dual Screen Display/WiFi6/BT5.2/USB3.0/Dual Gigabit LAN) with a Sonoff Zigbee and Zooz Z-Wave dongles).
I am computer literate (the fact that I took Fortran in college dates me). It took me four days to get HA working with the competing apps. Then, the cloud app never stayed connected for more than a few hours, even though I had the privilege of paying $6.50/month.
I will say HA picked up virtually every possible setting you could use as a metric, but I was overkill. It even recognized the battery-powered scale in the bathroom.
I finally gave up the ghost. Around the same time, I bought a Nest Gen4 Matter thermostat. I was so impressed how easy the process was, I decided to wait and get more Smartthings Matter devices.
I had never heard of Homey, but I kept seeing articles and reviews about it. After doing my research, I concluded that Smartthings was too small and HA was too big, but Homey was just right.
Smartthings would provide several settings, while HA lets you control almost everything. You just had to go to Github, find the best driver for your devices, and futz around with them until they worked.
Homey covers most of the important functions, and the flows steer you in the right direction and may discover a better path.
These are the fried ramblings of a newbee
